Lost in Transit

In a debut novel, a family of refuseniks emigrates to escape Soviet oppression, but its motives turn out to be mixed.

By

Sam Sacks

Updated March 28, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

The textbook history of Soviet refuseniks is a story of courage in the face of persecution. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing until the fall of the Soviet Union, Jews behind the Iron Curtain agitated to be allowed to repatriate to their ancestral homeland of Israel. Their demands provoked an onslaught of anti-Semitic reprisals from the Kremlin. But with a rekindled sense of religious identity, Soviet Jews pressed the fight for freedom, their struggles apotheosized by the nine-year imprisonment of activist Natan Sharansky, who was finally released and permitted to emigrate in 1986.

To this uncomplicated narrative David Bezmozgis is something of a refusenik. Himself a transplant from Riga, Latvia, to Toronto, he has written about the Jewish emigrants known as noshrim, those who secured Israeli visas but "dropped out" in transit to move instead to Australia, the U.S. or, in the case of Mr. Bezmozgis's characters, Canada. In a story in his 2004 collection, "Natasha," the young Mark Berman explains his parents' decision to turn away from the promised land: "Why were we rejecting our Israeli visas? Why were we so ungrateful to the State of Israel? . . . The answer to these questions," Mark says, "was 150 million angry Arabs."

In "The Free World," Mr. Bezmozgis's first book since "Natasha" and his debut novel, the Krasnansky family has escaped Latvia on Israeli visas and waits in Italy during the second half of 1978 to be accepted by the Canadian government. "Escape" is the wrong word, though; it implies decisiveness and urgency, and I'm not sure there has ever been a family in an immigrant novel so ambivalent about its future.

The patriarch is Samuil, a Red Army veteran and staunch communist who never really wanted to leave Riga to begin with. Stuck with his family in a purlieu of Rome densely populated by other displaced Jews, he immerses himself in his memories, which include seeing his father murdered by Cossacks and, just as hauntingly, informing on his cousin for Zionist activity.

Samuil's own cosmic retribution has been to bear two sons, Karl and Alec, who represent their generation by caring nothing about his causes. "Celebrate the workers on the anniversary of the Revolution?" they had asked themselves while in Riga. "Why not? Honor the Red Army on Red Army Day? Who could object? Either was a good excuse to avoid work."

ENLARGE

The Free World

By David Bezmozgis (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 356 pages, $26)

Karl is married with two kids and is kept on the sideline of events. It's Alec who is the black hole of the novel, radiating apathy like anti-matter. Passionate beliefs—in communism, Zionism, Judaism or even loyalty to family—melt away before his heedlessness. His sole allegiance is to his libido. Indeed, one major reason Alec has joined the Krasnanskys' emigration is that it provides him a means of persuading his mistress, Polina, to have an abortion. Horrified by the prospect of becoming a father, he pledges to marry Polina and spirit her away to a fresh start in a new land.

Why Polina has followed Alec to Italy is never altogether clear. She has divorced her husband, Maxim, to do so, submitted to the abortion and left behind her beloved sister, Nadja. We're meant to see her as an honest woman who has become somehow drugged by Alec's wily promises. His "ironical sophistication" lures her from Maxim, whose "pure, sentimental feeling" for the motherland strikes her as foolish and seems to stand for all of Latvia's unthinking obedience to Party lines.

But Alec is too childish to be malicious—all he really wants from emigration is "more freedom to bumble." The ironical sophistication in "The Free World" is instead supplied by the novel's author. Mr. Bezmozgis's prose has an attractive, polished veneer and is often witty, though always at someone's expense. Recalling a rare visit to a synagogue in Riga, for instance, Alec remembers dissident Jews defiantly celebrating Simchas Torah. Those who feared the KGB did so across the street—"even if, on so narrow a street, the concept of 'across' was merely semantic. Those who were more daring, or more seriously committed to getting a drink, danced in the synagogue's courtyard."

Mr. Bezmozgis rarely plumbs deeper than such twinkling mockeries. He is intent on stamping out any sentiment that may adhere to the plight of refuseniks. Alec thinks of Jewish activism as "histrionics"; the Krasnansky wives, Emma and Rosa, are scorned for their "hysteria"; Samuil is belittled for harboring "the old feelings" of the Soviet Union's heyday. Feelings in general are a target of deprecation.

It all starts to seem a little lazy and pointless. With "Natasha," Mr. Bezmozgis was hailed as a successor to the Yiddish-inflected immigrant authors of the 20th century. But "The Free World" is a pale, wise-cracking creature in comparison with the angry and full-throated work of Henry Roth or Bernard Malamud—or of the Canadian-Jewish standard-bearer Mordecai Richler. Mr. Bezmozgis more closely resembles a writer like Jonathan Franzen. He shares Mr. Franzen's unsavory high-handedness in dealing with his characters' flaws, and he is constantly compelling them to undergo ironic humiliations. And like Mr. Franzen's "Freedom," "The Free World" bears a title that is itself a form of sarcasm, betokening not liberation but license.

Free to do as he likes in the continuing limbo in Italy, Alec falls into an affair with a girl who blackmails him and pushes him into a rather shallow underworld of car theft and smuggling. As for Samuil, the decrepit paterfamilias and discredited true believer, his sorry fate can be safely predicted from the first chapter.

"The Free World" is, in all, a somewhat dispiriting turn for the immigrant novel. The Wandering Jew is one of literature's great themes, but in the past exile has been accompanied by yearning—for a home, an identity, a place in the world. There are plenty of Jews adrift in Mr. Bezmozgis's novel, but all that their wandering signifies is indifference to a destination.

Mr. Sacks writes a fiction chronicle for the Review section of the Journal's weekend edition.

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